Dogs.
Best posts made by Arkandel
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RE: I owe a lot of people some apologies.
For starters I want to thank people for staying - more or less - constructive in an emotionally charged thread.
Full disclosure: it's not the kind of conversation I enjoy to read let alone participate in. It feels a lot like sifting through other people's laundry, going over how friendships fell apart and who's at fault. More than anything such threads are about events which are none of my business unless it somehow involves predatory behavior the kind of which is endemic to MU* - and if it is not I avoid them. People don't always like each other, sometimes they quite dislike one another.
The reason I got pulled into it is because in this case an MSB administrator was involved and there was a complaint. To be clear, it was not @surreality who sent it, but it meant I had to ask around to figure out what happened. I still don't think I have all the facts, both the kind I think are relevant and the ones I would very much like to continue classifying as none of my damn business.
Here is the thing: I am no one's judge. I didn't sign up to be one. I can be judgy - hell, this is still MSB and most of us are in some ways - but when it comes down to it how popular one is doesn't mean anything to me. MSB bandwagons come and go, the mood shifts fast and it feeds on popcorn and people's frustration. I don't, and will not, run this forum based on that.
I was part of a few chats since yesterday night when I came home to this thread. A phrase that's come up a few times was "... I've gotten messages from people who feel the same way...". Yes, that's how it works - no one who doesn't feel that way will message a person on the other side of an emotionally charged argument. The majority of folks don't even know what's happening (myself included up to 12 hours ago) nor care, other perhaps than to read through and judge everyone here on all sides. Fresh popcorn has always been our official smell, I'm afraid.
To the point: The relevant word I care about when it comes to administrators here is misconduct. That's it. We've been - quite intentionally - stripped of much authority in the content that's permitted on these forums. Punitive actions are rare and exercised in extreme cases, posts are similarly extremely rarely deleted, edited or censored.
The popularity - at any given time, since that shifts - of one of us here is not relevant. Some of you dislike me (fools!); that's fine. Adoration is not mandatory to participate in this community. If it gets to the point someone feels they can't coexist it's okay to not log on here, too.
So far I have asked around and did not find cause to believe misconduct took place. If you have something to say about that you can reach out, here or in PMs. That's not specific to Auspice, mind you; Ganymede and yes, myself are also up to scrutiny - and if you are wondering there's been a succession plan in place if it comes to it and the forum needs to change hands should I do something exceptionally wrong. None of us here are larger than the community's need, and if it comes to it it will fall back to its founder who can then decide what to do with it.
To summarize: I hope this does not sound like we're circling the wagons - it's not my intention. If it does, so be it. But if there are facts regarding an MSB administrator's actions - actions as administrators - then I very much want to know. If you don't like them, or their posts, then I probably don't, but you can reach out anyway.
Thank you.
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RE: criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong
@bored said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:
So the mobs will exist. The only place it really matters is in terms of the mods taking that sort of 'public opinion' as having any meaning. Which is why (bringing this thread back to topic) we do want guarantees of being able to voice criticisms without being shouted down by the cheerleader squad for any particular game, just as much as we want safeguards against mob attacks being too vicious in non-designated areas.
A couple of things about that.
For starters there are no guarantees anyone won't be shouted down by someone else. The only question is whether it's personal (which outside of the Hog Pit is not acceptable) and if those shouts are correct - a lot of the time people who are quite eager to point fingers and raise hell about others prove to be much better about dishing it out than taking it when the table turns.
But also - and this is frustrating for me - this is not WORA. WORA has been dead for many years, it was being ran by different people, had different rules and it existed in a different time. I will take any criticism at all at face value but, dammit, please don't throw that in my face; it's like me complaining about something @Goldfish is doing in Echoes in the Mists by referencing the shitty things staff did in Haunted Memories.
Of course a lot of us carry baggage. Some have enmities going back a long time and there are definitely multiple cliques carried over from MU* both active and long gone. But we are also adults, dammit, and we can own our own shit; we can change if we decide to, we can improve if someone points out a way to do it and now and then we can say "okay, sure, I don't like you but I was out of line there and I'm sorry".
I have a lot of fun chatting with you people about all sorts of random shit, both MU* related and otherwise. I would miss many of you, including some I'm pretty sure don't care for me very much, if we didn't hang out somewhere much like MSB, if for no other reason than at the very least you all understand where I'm coming from.
I've spent too much time in this weird hobby and the only people who can really relate to it are you all.
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RE: RL things I love
Getting sort of kind of promoted at work. Something about work ethic and performance.
I spend half my day on MSB what the hell are my coworkers doing??
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RE: Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning
Perhaps we'll see some actual facts posted here or maybe we won't. So I can't speak about any specifics because there are none at the moment.
What I do know is I've known @lordbelh for years on several games, and the thought he's in any way a detrimental presence in a game is ludicrous. He has always carried himself in a mature way in any interactions I've seen, and until it's proven otherwise that will remain my impression of the guy; that's without even factoring his roleplay in the equation, just who he is as a person.
Arx is an excellent game. It's well coded, well thought out. But it's coming off increasingly as being ran demanding a 'yes-man' mentality where any kind of disagreement is perceived as dissent and treated harshly.
No game, no matter its worth, is perfect. None is above constructive criticism - and they can all benefit from it. Unless it is shown that @lordbelh had some sort of inappropriate, offensive meltdown or some such my interpretation of the situation is that he was punished for the offense of disagreeing with staff. And if that's how staff retaliated then it's wrong, no matter what.
I'd be happy to eat my words if we are shown something else. I'm afraid I won't need to.
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RE: RP Ice Breakers
Ice breaker: Join a scene and don't make yourself un-roleplayable.
It's that easy. Don't be lost in your thoughts, sitting at a bar staring at your phone. Don't be behind a newspaper. If someone tosses you a RP bone take it.
That's... all it takes. Don't be in your way.
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RE: Good or New Movies Review
Endgame.
It was incredible. It was a different movie than I expected as it set its pieces up, then it went from strength to strength.
I don't know how any franchise, including Marvel/Disney's, can top this. We might have just peaked for some time.
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RE: Good or New Movies Review
@Lotherio said in Good or New Movies Review:
***=That was the only scene that got cheers in your cinema?***click to show -
RE: RL Anger
I was tipped a twenty dollar bill and it had to be spilt between myself and a coworker.
I handed her $10 I had in my pocket and took the $20. She said it wasn’t fair that I had $20 and she only had $10.
I tried to explain to her that I already had the $10, so another $10 (that a previous customer had given me for busing her table) equalled $20. She couldn’t wrap her head around it, insisting I was trying to rip her off. She gave me back the ten bucks, took the twenty to a register and made change of two 10 dollar bills.
As she hands me mine I showed her that now I still have $20 and she has $10, but somehow she was satisfied she’d thwarted my attempts to short change her.
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RE: Dead Celebrities 2021 Edition
Remember him for his sharp wit. Even about cancer!
"I'm pretty sure, I'm not a doctor, but...I mean if you die, the cancer also dies at exactly the same time," Macdonald said. "So to me, that's not a loss. That's a draw."
"It's not like cancer goes home to fuck my wife afterwards."
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RE: Seeking Women for Multi-Game Harem
A thousand years ago I was on this MUD where staff politics included having regular meetings. Regular multi-hour long meetings where we voted about everything. Since this was back in MU*'s golden days with a hundred and fifty unique logins or so we had something like twenty staff members in that room discussing things to great length. Paragraphs and paragraphs of arguments.
It was boring as hell. So I was TSing with another staff member over pages (don't judge me! - okay, judge me, whatever).
Did I mention how boring this was and how long it was taking? Because at some point she mischannels, and instead of paging me, she poses it. In a room full of staff, one of whom was her RL husband.
All hell broke loose.
Yeah, so. No mav I've ever seen since beats that, but I'm sure one of you freaks has a better tale to tell.
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What's your nerd origin story?
I was thinking about what I read, watched or even heard of as a kid that got me into this geeky stuff many of us here are into - which I understand is now becoming mainstream but didn't always used to.
So maybe we can discuss what got you to be the person you now are, kind poster! What did you experience in your formative years that made you go "wow, that stuff is different and cool?".
For me it was a few completely separate experiences, many so random that it makes me wonder how things could have turned out if I hadn't had them.
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One of my childhood friends was around the day my parents were dragging me over to my mom's home town for a visit and he joined along (which had never happened before nor did since, usually I was the only kid there and bored as hell). So while we were walking around the empty streets there at mid-day he was telling me about this Conan the Barbarian movie he had watched, and I hadn't, describing all those insanely cool things about the hero falling into a dead king's tomb and fighting monsters - I was fucking hooked. Oh, and Thundercats, he had watched way more episodes than I had, and he made Mumm Ra sound so dangerous and intimidating.
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A different buddy of mine in elementary school - who's now a University professor in BC - lent me the Hobbit. I had no idea what it was but sure, I read it and I liked it. What a weird, different book that was. And then when I brought it back to him he told me there was 'another book' following it up... mind blown, books can have followups? Whaaat? So I read it out of curiosity and, spoiler alert, it was The Fellowship of the Ring which went off like a tactical nuclear bomb in my 12 year old mind. I read it twice, consuming every page like I was starving, and then could barely think of anything else. Nothing ever delivered that kind of awe for me since those first reads.
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So I broke my leg one summer. I was playing with my dog and fell off a wall (don't ask) which led a pre-teen boy being unable to play with his friends all summer long. It was going to be hell! But then again we had just gotten a VCR and my dad would bring anything I told him from the store, he didn't give a shit about ratings... so horror movies it was. How do I know I watched over a hundred of them in those weeks? Because I still have a small notebook where I had written their names since so many sounded very similar and it was confusing. What did the experience do for me? So much, from getting me fluent in a language I didn't speak that well over that small span of time to getting me exposed to all kinds of cult movies, from The Thing to Fright Night.
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For a long time as a teenager I was resisting reading Isaac Asimov. I didn't think I'd like science fiction since I had read some Arthur Clarke and it didn't quite agree with me... but I was bored at a bookstore one day and so I picked I, Robot. What do you mean heroes could rely on their brains? And abhor violence because it was a sign of incompetence? So by the time I read the Foundation series, going from one cliffhanger, logical puzzle, foreshadowed revelation I had completely missed and tied everything together - that stuff affected not just what I liked as a reader or even nerd but who I wanted to be as a person.
Strangely enough starting on MUDs or even AD&D wasn't that 'formative' for me because by then I was aware I was into and actively pursued these things. I do recall quite fondly reading the premise of Vampire: the Masquerade though when I was at university because it was such a compact, cool concept since it tied gameplay and theme in ways I still believe are really brilliant.
What's your nerd origin story?
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RE: Carnival Row
@Pyrephox said in Carnival Row:
My cynical suspicion, after Arx, is that I'd give it three months before the Chancellor's daughter is married to the head of the Black Raven in a huge public ceremony attended with pride by the city's finest humans, and several of the pixie prostitutes are given mansions in the Square by their human True Loves.
I give it two weeks before enlightened, liberal humans are openly advocating for full pixie civil rights in front of the entire governing body.
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RE: Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.
@aria Yeah, that guy is a bloody moron.
... I'll let myself out, I'm very sorry.
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RE: Games? Do they exist? Where?
@Rinel said in Games? Do they exist? Where?:
An irresistible urge to engage in the contumacious denial of the brevity so highly esteemed in these literary latter days and to revel in sesquipedalian verbiage akin to what a perspicacious member of the literati might find while perusing catalogues of authors past frequently engenders a sense of frustration and, dare I say, ire in the modern reader.
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